Off the Wall: This never would have happened under Gillick

EDITOR'S NOTE: "Off the Wall" is a new weekly column, written exclusively for seattlepi.com, by Derek Zumsteg, a local writer, blogger and keen observer of the Mariners and baseball in general.

Adrian Beltre and Richie Sexson agreed to deals with the Mariners last week for more than $100 million over the next five years. This is how great teams are built -- with stars and youngsters -- and the Mariners are finally going after both. They targeted young, elite talents they thought would help the team get back to respectability in 2005 and beyond.

This never would have happened in the Pat Gillick years. As Mariners general manager from 2000 to 2003, Gillick spent good money on older players of average ability who could be counted on to produce at their established level. If they blocked prospects from the team's farm system, well, that was considered an acceptable consequence. We saw what happened under this philosophy -- an entire infield of players past their primes, unable to drive the ball for power and slower with the glove with each passing game.

The Mariners' belief in a no-stars philosophy was a product of the 2001 season. Alex Rodriguez, Randy Johnson and Ken Griffey Jr. all had left, and still the team won 116 games. But that team had stars. Bret Boone had a season that would have fit in with the best of Joe Morgan's Hall of Fame years. Mike Cameron hit 25 home runs and played stellar defense. Ichiro was Rookie of the Year and the American League MVP. Edgar Martinez had another standout hitting year. And the pitching … Moyer and Garcia both had amazing years. Each of those guys would have been the best player on most teams in baseball that year. To say that the 2001 Mariners were a no-star team misses the point -- they were almost an all-star team.

Teams must have such elite players to succeed, players who are the best or nearly the best at their position. If a team fills a couple of key positions with players like that, it can support them in a number of ways. It can take gambles on players coming off down years or prospects coming up from the farm system. Or it can fill those positions with stopgaps to retain the flexibility to upgrade later if the team finds itself in contention.

But if you stock your team with an infield of highly paid veterans, you've got no place to break in your prospects. You're forced to trade them or pound them into being outfielders or pitchers.

Great, sustainable teams are built with some variation of the stars-and-filler strategy. The Red Sox won in 2004 with a set of established, well-paid stars supported with a cast of who-dat players plucked from scrap heaps and the lunch entrée section of the free-agent menu. The dominant Yankees teams featured mercenaries placed around a core of home-grown stars in Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada. The great Braves teams cycled in new, young talent from their farm system and supplemented it with wise investments in quality free agents, and made run after run at the title. Cleveland rebuilt from scratch, signing future star talents to long-term deals early and then, when the team started to compete, finding the short-term hires to help out.

Great teams have more than one high-paid player. The teams on which one player consumes an inordinate amount of the payroll are almost entirely teams that are being torn down, such as the first post-championship Marlins team when Gary Sheffield was still on the roster.

Take any of the best players from the championship Red Sox. Manny Ramirez, if still on the Indians payroll, would account for more than a quarter of it. The Indians still would have lost games like crazy because their only good hitter this year would have been Manny Ramirez. As a team adds good players as the Red Sox did, total payroll rises, making their good contracts a relatively smaller part of the whole.

But it requires a team to make the right choice when it puts down that kind of money. Baseball is littered with the carcasses of awful contracts. Current Mariners GM Bill Bavasi, while in Anaheim, signed Mo Vaughn to one of the worst deals in modern baseball history, which the Angels eventually dumped on the Mets. The lessons from the disasters of free agency are clear:

- The younger the player, the better;

- The older the player, the shorter the contract should be;

- The more athletically built the player, the better;

- Premium positions make the most difference

The first two are obvious. Players, as a group, peak when they're about 27 years of age. Some peak earlier, some later, but on average, 27 is the magic number. Good players can stay close to that level of performance, but decline is inevitable.

Research has confirmed the intuitive belief that fast, powerful players age best. A player such as Carlos Beltran, who hits for a high average and drives the ball well, matures to add power and walks and can still be effective as he loses bat speed. A player such as Mo Vaughn, who has what people call "older-player skills" -- the walks, the home runs -- ages much less gracefully, and sometimes drops off the face of the sport in one glorious collapse of a season.

It probably didn't help Vaughn's knees that he weighed in at three bills and change, either.

This is why Adrian Beltre was an amazing bargain, possibly a stunning coup for the Mariners, while Richie Sexson -- well, we'll get to that.

Adrian Beltre will be 26 next season. He plays a difficult defensive position well. He was runner-up in National League MVP voting in a stadium so tough on hitters that it's comparable to Safeco Field. It's true that this was a standout season, and that people wondered if he had any future in baseball at all just the year before. But here's the thing -- in 2001, Beltre had an emergency appendectomy that nearly killed him. He lost weight and strength, and had to undergo further surgical procedures. His 2002 was a lost season, and 2003 wasn't much better. Is it fair to think an elite athlete can take two years to get back to form after an experience like that? I think so. His minor-league statistical lines are outstanding, especially for a player so young. Then, entering his 20s, Beltre showed in 1999 and 2000 that he was a tremendous player, heralded widely as a future superstar. After his setback, it merely took until 2004 before we saw that player again.

But the two injury years scared teams off. The Mariners and Dodgers were the only serious suitors, and the M's got him for a song. This is a tremendous risk -- if Beltre ends up a .260 hitter with 15 home runs and plays a good defensive third base, it will be a bad deal for the Mariners. But the reward is so potentially high that Beltre is the bargain of this off-season so far.

Think of it this way: the Mariners bought a lottery ticket for $1. There's a chance they'll get 50 cents back on it, but at least an equally good chance they're going to get $3, $5, and make a sweet profit. These are the gambles the team should be taking. This off-season has been filled with teams paying risky players such as Pedro Martinez as if they'll be as healthy and good as they could possibly be for their whole contracts. And that's just wasting money.

Which brings us to Richie Sexson. In 2003, he was one of the best players in baseball, hitting for power, controlling the strike zone and playing superior defense at first. He didn't do that last year. He tore up his shoulder swinging twice and missed almost the whole year. Labrum injuries end careers and frequently dog athletes. Sure, he went through a gauntlet of medical examinations and has been proclaimed healthy, but we're not going to really know how well he'll hit, if at all, until he starts swinging for real. And that shoulder's going to be uninsurable. At the same time, he'll be 30 next year, and doesn't hit for a high average. He may decline a little over the first few years of this contract, but even if he's healthy, the Mariners are going to be paying him an immense amount of money for a guy who, outside of that one season (at age 28!) has only been a pretty good hitter.

Frankly, we'd have been better off with Carlos Beltran for more money. But it's hard to complain right now -- even if I may disagree with the Mariners' choice of Sexson, it's clear that the team has embraced the concept of paying top dollar for top talent. As a result, this is going to be a far more competitive and interesting team to watch.